→ May 29, 2018
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Beast.

Who is the actual Beast of this taut, Hitchcockian thriller’s title? Although we’re led to believe from the start that it’s the rakish, mysterious outsider, who quickly becomes the suspect in a series of killings of young girls on the British Crown Dependency of Jersey, the title, like many other names and aspects of this intense and well-acted film, carries more than one meaning. (It’s available to rent on amazon.)

Beast is the debut feature from director and screenwriter Michael Pearce, who has just a handful of British TV credits to his name, and hinges on a star turn from Irish actress Jessie Buckley as Moll, a young woman in her mid-20s who lives with her domineering mother and senile father in a giant house that still feels awfully close on screen. The film opens with Moll’s birthday party, at which she is quickly upstaged by her beautiful sister, leading Moll to flee to go out dancing all night, eventually leading her to a chance encounter with Pascal (Johnny Flynn), a rifle-toting loner who lives on his own and seems to be the only person who treats Moll as an individual. His status as an outsider from polite society – ironic, as he’s of old Jersey stock, evidenced by his French surname, Deneuve – makes him an easy target for the police as they look for the man who’s raped and killed three teenaged girls on the small island, pushing Moll into the quandary of having to lie to protect her new lover or to question the possibility that he’s a murderer.

Pascal posterAlthough the obvious implication of the title and the posters showing Flynn out of focus at the front of the picture is that Pascal is or might be the beast, the script regularly offers us potential interpretations of the term. Moll herself has something in her past that’s revealed in stages over the course of the film, but it’s clear from the start that she is at least a complex character with something serious and unaddressed inside of her, based on something she does before leaving the house during her party. There’s a graphic scene later in the film involving an animal Moll shoots under Pascal’s training that also reveals an unexpected rage within Moll that will also be gradually and incompletely explained as the film progresses. And her mother, Hillary (Geraldine James), who favors her other two children over Moll, is utterly terrifying in her controlling nature, reducing Moll to a blubbering child, and her instantaneous shifts to everything-is-okay mode, even concluding one scolding with, “Let’s all be friends again.” Even as we’re given a Moll-Pascal relationship that could be dangerous, we’re given plain evidence that the relationship between Hillary and her mother is downright toxic.

Pascal’s name itself feels like another ironic twist in a film laden with irony and misdirection. Pascal’s wager argues that a bet on God’s existence, and thus eternal life after death, has a positive payoff if correct but little or no negative cost if wrong, while a bet against God’s existence, thus living a life of sin, has a huge negative cost if wrong and little to no benefit if correct. Beast‘s version of Pascal’s wager for Moll is flipped on its head – she can bet that he’s not the killer, but that bet carries some rather substantial downside risk for her, and she may actually be chasing the illusion of love rather than a true version of it. Even when she sees a glimpse of what Pascal is capable of doing when angry, and gets evidence from her very creepy cop friend (or cousin?) that Pascal has hurt someone before, she still decides to believe in her lover rather than anything else she’s seen – and we are left in the dark right up until the end of the film on whether she made the right call.

The ending of Beast is wonderfully ambiguous as well; after Pascal does something I would call unforgivable, the tenor shifts, and the last layers of Moll’s exterior are peeled back, and their entire relationship changes color to something much darker and bleaker. Buckley’s performance as Moll is riveting – I doubt there will be five better performances by lead actresses in all of 2018 – as she seems to portray a set of interrelated characters all rolled up into one, at times appearing to be an awkward teenager, at times an independent and headstrong adult. The film also gives us clues as to her states of mind or roles within scenes by changing Buckley’s hairstyle, whether it’s pulled back, tightly curled, frizzy, even a little mussed, just enough to alter her mien and put her in different footing in each setting. (Also, I know that the fairy tale character’s hair isn’t red, but the scenes of Moll walking through the forest gave me a Little Red Riding Hood vibe … and we’re left to wonder if Pascal is a real human or just a wolf in disguise.)

The scenes with Cliff and one with a stark, accented policewoman from off island are a bit forced, and it’s unclear why Moll or Pascal would be interrogated without attorneys or would agree to it when not obligated to stay; those are the only times when the tension flags and the element that puts the viewer right into the film starts to fade. The remainder of Beast is utterly intense from start to finish, and the conclusion is just ambiguous enough to let the viewer come up with another interpretation, Memento-like, to everything that came before. This deserves a much wider audience, and Buckley in particular should be on everyone’s short list for acting awards in the fall.

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→ May 23, 2018
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Mary and the Witch’s Flower.

Hayao Miyazaki is retired, or so he says – he’s pulled this trick before, at least – but his protégés continue to make films that are very much in the spirit of his work, with the latest incarnation Mary & the Witch’s Flower (amazon • iTunes), a 2017 release in Japan that received a brief theatrical release here in January. Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi (who also directed The Secret World of Arriety and When Marnie Was There for Ghibli) and animated by Studio Ponoc, the film was an enormous commercial success in its native country and deserved a far better fate here. It was eligible for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature this past winter, and was yet another entry that was passed over for the execrable Boss Baby.

Based on a children’s novel by Mary Stewart called The Little Broomstick, Mary & the Witch’s Flower tells the story of the young girl of the title, who discovers a rare flower in the woods near her great aunt’s estate: the fly-by-night, a glowing flower that, according to local legend, is valued by witches for its immense magical powers. She finds the flower with the help of two cats, Gib and Tib, who then lead her to a broomstick that takes her to a secret magical school in the clouds, Endor, but this isn’t Hogwarts or Brakebills, and something is very amiss with the headmistress (voiced by Kate Winslet) and the chemistry teacher (Jim Broadbent). When they find out Mary (Ruby Barnhill of The BFG) has the fly-by-night, they drop all pretense and seem willing to try anything to seize the flower, including kidnapping Mary’s friend Peter to try to turn him into a warlock. Mary has to choose whether to use her last remaining bulbs to rescue her friend, and also finds out (somewhat predictably) that this isn’t her family’s first encounter with the fly-by-night or Endor and its faculty.

Miyazaki’s films have a distinctive look and feel, including a particular appreciation for natural landscapes and an obsession with flying; Yonebayashi brings all of those visual and aural elements to Mary & the Witch’s Flower, to the point where I doubt most casual fans of the genre would recognize that Miyazaki wasn’t directly involved in this film. It also has the same sort of childlike sense of wonder that most of the master’s scripts brought, but the story itself isn’t as tight or compelling; it’s pretty obvious that Mary’s getting home, Peter probably isn’t going to turn into some sort of monster, and who the mysterious girl in red from the cold open grows up to be. It’s a kids’ movie that’s really just for kids, whereas Miyazaki’s best movies — Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Ponyo — were much more nuanced and thoughtful, so that they offered something for adults as well as children. I know Miyazaki’s students won’t and can’t just replicate all aspects of his films, but Yonebayashi seems to have focused here on mimicking the style of his mentor without providing the same kind of substance that a film like this should offer.

Of course, it’s still #BetterThanBossBaby.

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→ May 17, 2018
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The Insult.

The Insult (iTunes • amazon) was the one modest surprise among the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars this past year, edging out Golden Globes winner In the Fade and the highly-regarded Israeli film Foxtrot. The first Lebanese submission to earn such a nomination and just the fourteenth film ever submitted for consideration from Lebanon, The Insult is a multi-layered drama that uses a minor disagreement to build a courtroom drama, a fable about racism, and a demonstration of how tiny gestures in either direction can have enormous consequences.

Toni Hanna is a Lebanese Christian man who works at a garage and lives in an apartment he hopes to buy, along with his very pregnant (and ridiculously beautiful) wife Shirine. He’s hosing off his balcony on one day when the excess water runs out his drain pipe, which apparently is a code violation, on to a few construction workers led by the foreman Yasser, a Palestinian man who has lived in Lebanon for years and married a Lebanese woman. When Yasser and his crew fix the pipe without Toni’s permission, he destroys their work, leading Yasser to call him a “fucking prick.” Toni demands an apology, but when Yasser balks, Toni takes him to court in a lawsuit that begins as something trivial and ends up a national news story, spiraling well beyond the control of either man. The trial exposes the origins of Toni’s racism and the ‘forgotten’ history of sectarian violence in Lebanon, including one incident where the PLO and PFLP (both major Palestinian terrorist organizations) played a significant part.

The superficial story in The Insult plays out a bit like a smarter Law & Order episode. The two trials – the first in a small court, the second an appeal argued by experienced lawyers working pro bono – feel overly dramatic, although it’s possible the Lebanese justice system works something like this, with judges asking witnesses and even members of the courtroom audience questions. There’s a big twist right before the midpoint of the film that amps up the drama quotient of the trial, although in the end it doesn’t matter much to the main plot around the dispute between the two men.

The plot thread around race is, I think, the Big Point of The Insult, and you could carry the framework very well to a similar story in just about any multi-ethnic state. Palestinians are an underclass in many nations in the Levant, and there appears to be widespread resentment against them and their somewhat protected status in Lebanon, so when Toni appears to be fighting back on behalf of Lebanese Christians, he garners public support and finds a well-known lawyer willing to take on his case to make a point. Yasser ends up with a young lawyer who says she wants to take his case because no one stands up for Palestinians’ rights, and she’s derided as a sort of limousine liberal by her opponents while also gaining popular backing from Lebanese Muslims and several politicians pushing for national unity.

The film goes too far in justifying Toni’s feelings towards Palestinians, however, when it delves into the history of his family and the incident from his childhood, the Damour massacre, that spawned his lifelong animosity towards them and support for nationalist-Christian politicians. The scene where that story is unfurled is also quite over the top, again feeling very TV-dramatized, and almost crushes the better plot thread of a quiet shift towards reconciliation between the two men. There’s one moment of sincere kinship that arises by accident, and then Yasser finds a way to deliver to Toni what he thinks Toni really wants from him, enough that the outcome of the trial – which we do see, even though I thought the script might end right before the verdict was delivered – feels a bit secondary. There’s an actual moral here, reminiscent of “A Thousand Trees” by Stereophonics, about how a tiny gesture either way can start a conflagration or defuse a potential riot: At any point, an apology from Yasser or a statement of forgiveness from Toni would have ended the entire conflict. The two men could have simply shaken hands in front of the cameras and brought the two sides together. The Insult doesn’t quite cop out to that extent, even though the legal stuff feels manipulative (even with a superb secondary performance from the wonderfully-named Diamond Bou Abboud as Yasser’s attorney). The story ends up taking a middle path, wrapping up the story in a satisfying enough fashion that still felt like it could have been stronger without the more crowd-pleasing aspects of the story to drown out the humanist plot at the movie’s heart.

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→ May 8, 2018
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You Were Never Really Here.

I’m a known sucker for just about anything noir or even noir-ish – I mean, my most anticipated movie of 2018 is The Happytime Murders, which might be best categorized as “Muppet film noir” – so Lynne Ramsey’s latest movie, You Were Never Really Here, is more or less right in my subjective wheelhouse. It is dark as hell, unrelenting, and viscerally satisfying even as the grotesque imagery disturbs you. With yet another star turn from Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role, it gives the hero/antihero dichotomy a third look, with a detective who suffers from PTSD due to repeated traumas and channels some of that energy into finding missing girls – and into brutally beating his adversaries with a hammer.

Based on a novella by Jonathan Ames, You Were Never Really Here gives us Joe (Phoenix), a private detective who seems obsessed with secrecy to a paranoid extent, and who we see from the very start engages in self-destructive behavior like nearly asphyxiating himself in dry-cleaner plastic bags. He returns from a successful rescue in Cincinnati to see his boss, McCleary (John Doman of The Wire), and eventually receives a new assignment to rescue the missing daughter of a widowed state senator. Beginning with an address that the senator received via an anonymous text, Joe stakes out the building, which he suspects is a brothel with underaged girls inside, but the rescue attempt opens him up to a broader conspiracy – perhaps justifying his earlier paranoia – and a spreading web of violence that puts everyone close to Joe in the killers’ sights.

The mystery around the missing girl, Nina (played by Ekaterina Samsonov, who is 15 but looks much younger for this role), is secondary to the story of Joe, which we get via brief, often disjointed flashbacks as they might appear in Joe’s own mind as he re-experiences traumatic memories from childhood, where his father was abusive to him and to Joe’s mother; and from his time serving in the Army in the Middle East. The depiction of trauma is hard to watch, but ultimately realistic in how the brain revisits the trauma and the actions a victim might take as coping mechanisms that don’t do anything to solve the long-term problem. Rather than use the traumatic history as a plot device – here’s why Joe is the way he is – the film shows the ongoing damage he’s suffering from it. To the very end, there is no indication that Joe, who wants to assure Nina that thinks will be okay, is anything close to okay himself.

Phoenix is tremendous in this role, delivering a more nuanced performance than he did with his Oscar-nominated impersonation of Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, giving Joe the right level of simmering rage that gives little warning before it boils over. He won Best Actor at Cannes last year, just about a year ago this week, for the film, which also won the Best Screenplay award there for Ramsey. (It lost the Palme d’Or to The Square, which is a poor choice and seems a very Cannes thing to have happen.) Samsonov is a revelation in a small but critical role, one that becomes much more important and, I would imagine, difficult for a child actor, as the story progresses and Nina becomes more than just a prop for the plot.

The film is dark in the literal sense as well, with grimy shots of alleys and stairwells, disorienting top-down shots of Joe in action, and even some violence (almost all of which is left off-camera) shown as if on security-camera footage. The hammer is Joe’s weapon of choice, for reasons that become apparent in the film as well, but Ramsey films the various assaults from behind Joe or from such a distance that you don’t actually see the hits. There’s blood in the film, but it’s all shown after the fact, and in those cases it’s not Joe’s doing; the one time we see Joe interacting with one of his own victims, the result is morbidly comic and almost sentimental, one of the only times we get a glimpse of Joe’s deeply empathetic streak when he’s not beating someone’s brains in.

The lack of air is a recurring motif in this film, a possible metaphor for the feelings of panic and the sense of being ‘trapped’ that often haunt PTSD sufferers until they get real help (not just, say, cognitive behavioral therapy, which doesn’t work for PTSD). There’s no sign here that Joe has ever sought treatment, so he’s caught in a cycle of reliving his traumas, even dissociating for moments, to the point where I expected it to eventually cost him in a physical conflict. (I won’t spoil whether that happens.) But we keep returning to situations where he can’t breathe, or finds someone in such a situation, which certainly mirrors the experience of having a full-blown panic attack.

This isn’t a movie for everyone or even for most people; it’s grim, there’s enough results-of-violence on screen to merit the R rating, and while we see none of the abuse of underaged girls, it’s present enough in the story that it would likely deter many viewers. I think it’s superb, however, reminiscent of the bleak noir novels of Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me, pop. 1280) or Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. While not quite as hopeless as those books can be, You Were Never Really Here captures that same sense of existential darkness, and like Thompson’s books in particular, it succeeds in getting us inside the head of the protagonist and using the crime as a vehicle to explore his character in a way few films in the detective/noir genre have done.

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→ May 3, 2018
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In the Fade.

The German film In the Fade won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film this year, and made the Oscars shortlist of nine candidates before falling short of the final five. This revenge fantasy drama follows Katja (Diane Kruger) through the aftermath of a neo-Nazi terrorist attack that kills her Turkish husband and their son, including a trial of the two suspects, but ultimately is carried by Kruger even when the plot is a little predictable and the secondary characters far too hackneyed for what the film is trying to say.

The story opens with a long cold open that runs us quickly through Katja’s marriage to Nuri and a glimpse of their current life, with Nuri running a small business in a Turkish area of Hamburg. Katja drops their son Rocco off at Nuri’s office for the afternoon so she can visit with her pregnant friend, but when she returns to pick them up, she finds a crime scene: a bomb went off in front of the office, killing Nuri and Rocco and damaging their bodies beyond recognition.

We get all of this before the opening credits, in less than ten minutes, so the focus of the film truly is on Katja’s reactions and how the system seems to fail her at every turn. Nuri had been jailed for drug distribution, so the officer investigating the crime immediately assumes that he had resumed those activities and blames the victim; a subsequent search of the house finds drugs Katja had used to ‘numb the pain,’ but no evidence Nuri had been dealing again. Katja’s almost impossibly perfect description of one of the suspects helps lead to an arrest, but at the trial, the lawyer for the two bombers – who looks like an emaciated John Malkovich – suborns perjury and tears into Katja, saying her testimony isn’t credible because she’s a drug user. Despite fairly compelling evidence, the two are acquitted as the judges find reasonable doubt as to their guilt, which leads Katja feeling abandoned and seeking revenge any way she can find it.

In the Fade is gripping to watch, primarily because Kruger – who won best Actress at Cannes last year for this role – is such a dominant presence on the screen. She’s forced to carry all the weight because there isn’t another three-dimensional character to be found anywhere in the film: her mother is a racist train wreck, her mother-in-law blames her for her son’s and grandsons’ deaths, her own lawyer is kind of perfect in his own way, and so on. The script is tight, but it’s about as nuanced as a sledgehammer to the forehead.

And what is this film trying to say? It ends with a note about the number of terrorist incidents linked to neo-Nazis in Germany in recent years … but we knew they were bad, and it’s not like In the Fade explores the rise of these movements, or how they recruit, or what Germany might do to fight them. The two suspects are unrepentant sociopaths – although I did like that the one detail we get on them is that they enjoy jogging. It works better as a portrait of one woman’s grief, and her question of whether she can go on living without her husband and son, and with no real support from her own parents.

Kruger is up to the task, veering from shock to grief to rage to despair, and giving us every reason to believe her resolve when she sets out to avenge her family’s deaths, with an ending that’s only partly satisfying and entirely unsettling. Perhaps the idea here was to show how the system revictimizes those already hurt by terror attacks, but the script here is too lopsided to make that point effectively. I do think making the surviving victim of a terror attack aimed at immigrants a white, blonde, German woman does make the point that these killings don’t just affect the ‘other,’ and that many immigrants have already assimilated somewhat or totally into western societies.

If Kruger hadn’t delivered such a compelling performance as Woman on the Verge, however, none of the screenwriter’s points would have landed anyway. I wouldn’t have given this a nomination over any of the four Oscar-nominated foreign films I’ve seen from 2017, but between Kruger’s performance, the tight pacing, and the strong soundtrack & score from Josh Homme (the movie takes its title from a Queens of the Stone Age song), I’d still recommend it to a lot of people over a weird, scattershot art film like The Square or a movie as grim as Loveless, both of which are definitely not crowd-pleasers.

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→ April 12, 2018
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Isle of Dogs.

Wes Anderson might be the most divisive director making movies in English today, as his fans love his work, and everyone else hears his twee dialogue and heads for the exits. He’s been on a critical roll lately, with The Fantastic Mr. Fox (good, but not very faithful to the wonderful book by Roald Dahl), Moonrise Kingdom, and the Oscar-nominated Grand Budapest Hotel. I had only seen two complete Anderson films, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Bottle Rocket (somewhat annoying), and turned off Rushmore (insufferable) after about 20 minutes. So when I tell you Isle of Dogs, Anderson’s new, animated film from an original script, is excellent, perhaps it means a little more than when an Anderson fanboy critic says the same. It’s just great, no qualifier needed.

Isle of Dogs gives us an alternate-history Japan, ruled by the Kobayashi clan, which hates dogs based on a centuries-old grievance. The current Mayor of the city of Megasaki, also a Kobayashi, comes up with a scheme to banish all dogs from the city to Trash Island, while scapegoating the dogs for numerous public health problems and overcrowding. Trash Island becomes a concentration camp, looking more like one as the scheme and the film progress, with dogs organizing themselves into packs and fighting over scraps of food.

Atari, the 12-year-old ward of the Mayor, who is his distant uncle, hijacks a tiny plane and flies to Trash Island to find his dog, Spots, the first canine exiled to the island. He lands near one group of five dogs who, despite not understanding Japanese, figure out why he’s there and resolve to help him – especially since he is the only owner who has tried to come rescue his lost pet. This leads them on a quest the length of the island, all the while the Mayor and his henchman Domo try to recapture him and advance their plans to eliminate all of the dogs forever. At the same time, an American exchange student named Tracy Walker, boasting a comically round head of curly blonde hair, leads her Japanese classmates in starting a pro-dog resistance movement, during which she develops a crush on Atari, who has become a folk hero to dog lovers in Japan.

Anderson’s conceit here is to have all of the human characters other than Tracy speak Japanese, with translations appearing in subtitles as needed, while the dogs’ barks are ‘translated’ into English by the voice actors (or magic, I’m not sure which). This lets Anderson set a movie in Japan while using most of his favorite actors, and this one has a whopper of a cast – Bryan Cranston, Frances McDormand, Scarlett Johanssen, Jeff Goldblum (playing himself in dog form), Tilda Swinton (as a pug, which just made me laugh every time she spoke), F. Murray Abraham, Bob Balaban, Yoko Ono, Fisher Stevens, and, as “Mute Poodle,” Anjelica Huston, with narration by Courtney B. Vance. It’s also lighter on the twee-talk than the other Anderson films I’ve seen, perhaps because the script is credited to four writers, and I can only assume someone in the room pointed out, “You know, nobody talks like this in the real world, Wes. This is why everyone thinks you’re a fuckin’ weirdo.”

The story is totally over the top, so if you have problems with absurd plots in animated films – the octopus driving the truck in Finding Dory or the baggage-cart sequence at the end of Toy Story 2 come to mind – you may find suspending your disbelief hard here. Anderson et al compensate by populating the island with so many unique and surprisingly well-defined characters (given how little dialogue some of them get) that I found it easy to just roll with the story, even when Atari and the dogs built a fleet of boats to get themselves back to the mainland for the final confrontation. But there really isn’t any avoiding the fact that Kobayashi and his group are Nazis, the dogs are Jews being rounded up and sent to concentration camps to suffer and die, and oh by the way doesn’t this resemble stuff happening in the United States right now?

Like The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs — say that out loud, if you haven’t caught the pun — is a stop-motion animated film, and the animation quality here shows a marked improvement from the preceding film. Several sequences are just visually enchanting, like the preparation of a bento box of sushi, or Atari giving the dog Chief a bath. The use of what looks like cotton batting to depict fight scenes is a great touch, and the details on Trash Island, while occasionally a bit gross, are meticulous and often look surprisingly real.

There has been much debate over whether Anderson is appropriating Japanese culture, or doing it well enough to get away with it, in this film, a debate in which I feel unqualified to participate, so I will merely link to film critic Justin Chang’s piece on the topic and walk away. Anderson puts numerous works of Japanese art in the background of the film, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai (several times, with dogs added) and Evening Bell by Hiroshige, both major figures in the Edo period of Japanese art; he based Megasaki city’s design on metabolist architecture from the Japanese architect Tanga; and he makes use of classical Japanese drumming several times as part of the score. (It’s much better than the mumblemopey song “I Won’t Hurt You” that besets the film like a frightened skunk in two different scenes.) There’s a clear affinity for Japanese art and culture, but whether it is done in a sensitive or appropriate manner here is not really for me to say.

I took my daughter, who is nearly 12, to see this, since she loved Mr. Fox and does indeed love dogs (and all animals, as far as I can tell). She thought much of the movie was sad, and had a hard time seeing references to dogs that died off screen. There’s also one death of a human in the film, and a lot of tears from human and dog characters. Her final verdict was that it was good, but she preferred Mr. Fox, which isn’t so graphic and which keeps dark elements in the dialogue rather than in the imagery. It’s animated, but it’s not a kids’ movie. We both laughed quite a bit, although I think I laughed more than she did, perhaps because I caught more of the subtle jokes about dog behavior and a few references she didn’t catch. (Yoko Ono’s character name is one; don’t look it up till you see the film.) With The Incredibles 2 coming out in two months, we might actually have a real fight for the title of best animated film this year.

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→ April 6, 2018
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Black Panther.

I’ve never been a big fan of the superhero genre of fiction, whether it’s comic books, TV cartoons, or the recent wave of movies set in the Marvel or DC universes. (I never collected or read comic books as a kid.) The characters never really work for me as fully realized individuals; the “it’s hard to have super powers” theme always felt rather silly, yet it keeps coming up in this corner of fiction. The Dark Knight is the only major superhero movie I’ve seen in the last decade, and I thought it was fine, but overlong and probably too ambitious for its execution. I never saw its sequel.

So I originally figured Black Panther would be another big hit that I skipped because it’s just not my kind of story; only when the critical praise was as effusive as the public’s reaction did I figure I should check the film out. There are two major elements here that I feel like I’m unqualified to discuss – how it compares to other superhero films, and the script’s attention to detail and and authentic depiction of sub-Saharan African culture – but I can at least break it down as a movie like any other work of fiction, and it is, of course, very good, with performances and visuals strong enough to overcome some flaws in the second plot and a sudden loss of momentum partway through the film.

Black Panther is both superhero and king of the (fictional) African kingdom of Wakanda, which appears to be located somewhere in the Great Lakes region of Africa near present-day Rwanda, a utopian society with technology well beyond that of any other country thanks to its location on top of the world’s largest deposit of the (fictional) metal vibranium. Wakanda has sealed itself off from the world, cloaking its location and its riches so the world doesn’t show up at its door with hands out or guns aimed. The story opens with a brief prologue showing the former king seeking out a traitor, his own brother, in Oakland, after which we see the coronation of the new king and Black Panther, played by Chadwick Boseman (42), and the first plot, around the theft of a half-ton of vibranium and the assassination of his father, kicks into gear.

That first storyline takes up about half the film, and it’s a chance for some great special effects and superhero-style combat, although the enemy, named Claue (no relation), is just a madman and not terribly interesting. That turns out to be a red herring of sorts, as the second half of the film involves a different, more politically-oriented plot, with a threat to the king coming from an unexpected outside source with connections to Wakanda, forcing the Black Panther to defend his throne and eventually retake control of the kingdom in a giant battle reminiscent of that in The Return of the King.

Boseman is solid as the title character, and apparently the ladies very much approve of his casting, but I thought he was overshadowed by the three leading actresses around him: His former lover, Nakia, played by Lupita Nyong’o; his sister, Shuri, played by Letitia Wright; and the head of the (all-female!) presidential guard, Okoye, played by Danai Gurira. are all more dynamic and fill roles more commonly filled by men in action films, especially Shuri, the tech expert who gets to make all the fun gadgets for Black Panther to wear, and who also gets the best one-liners in the movie. (“No, it’s Kansas,” was second only to the joke about vegetarians if I’m ranking the quips in the movie.) This isn’t just a movie that stars African-American actors in nearly every significant role, but it’s also one of the most female-forward action films I’ve ever seen, and never stoops to jokes about their femininity or contrasts their toughness with their gender. Boseman himself has somewhat less to work with, even in the titular role, because of what he has to be – the even-keeled statesman who sometimes puts on a mask and funny suit and kicks some ass – and there’s very little room for him to work beyond that, even when he tries to convince Nakia to stay in Wakanda and be his queen. Their chemistry is much better when they’re plotting and scheming than when they’re supposed to be in love.

The story itself starts to drag around the 2/3 mark, when Black Panther has been deposed by the usurper, even though we know he’s going to come back to fight to reclaim it. (Otherwise, there wouldn’t be much of a movie here.) The loss of momentum in the action comes as the script tries, with modest success, to delve into more contemporary political themes and into some perennial philosophical questions. Does Wakanda, a nation of endless prosperity (and great health care!), have a moral obligation to share its technology or resources with the world? Should Wakanda open its borders to refugees from war torn or famine-struck nations around it? With black populations in U.S. cities like Oakland (where the real Black Panther Party started) caught in a cycle of poverty and crime, does Wakanda have any responsibility to help its brethren?

The usurper arrives and all but promises to Make Wakanda Great Again with a “Wakanda First!” speech and belligerent mentality, arguing that Wakanda should show the world its greatness by force. His arrival and his words split the ruling council of tribal leaders, some of whom are rather quick to abandon their king’s pacificist-isolationist policies in support of the upstart. We know how this is likely to end, although the final battle is drawn out to try to infuse some drama into the inevitable outcome; there are few surprises, unless you still have a hard time seeing these badass women in every fight scene.

The cast is really strong across the board, with solid supporting performances by Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Martin Freeman (yep, that’s Watson, with an American accent), and Michael B. Jordan, and smaller but still notable contributions from Angela Bassett as the queen mother and Sterling K. Brown as the first King’s brother. (His name, N’Jobu, is a little unfortunate if you grew up with Major League, which I don’t think bothered as much with cultural accuracy or sensitivity.)

I’ll be very curious to see if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences considers Black Panther seriously for any non-technical awards, given its critical reception and awareness of the awards’ tendency to overlook African-American films and actors in several recent slates of nominees. Star Wars earned a Best Picture nod in 1977, one of ten nominations for the film that year, and it’s probably the best historical analogue to Black Panther as a sci-fi action flick. It shouldn’t hurt that the cast includes two Oscar winners for acting (Nyong’o and Forrest Whitaker) and two more past nominees (Bassett and Kaluuya). If I had to bet money right now on one non-technical nomination, it’d be for Best Original Screenplay for Ryan Coogler (who directed this and also wrote and directed Creed and Fruitvale Station) and Joe Robert Cole (The People v. O.J. Simpson). I also wonder how many voters would check off Octavia Spencer’s name if she made the original ballot, even though she’s not actually in this movie.

As I said at the beginning, I’ve largely avoided superhero films because their stories just don’t speak to me, and I don’t think Black Panther will change that – it is so exceptional in the depth of its setting and back story while also bringing together as strong a cast as you could assemble that it’s not something other films in the genre could easily replicate. Even with that jarring momentum shift while Black Panther is temporarily off the throne is just a brief setback, one that made me more conscious of the film’s running time (a little over two hours) but didn’t truly detract form the experience. I will predict, however, that it ends the year as one of the top ten English-language movies I see.

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→ April 3, 2018
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Ranking 2017 movies.

So I finally saw Loveless, the one film I thought I had to see before I could put together a ranking of all the 2017 films I saw, which can also serve as an index of my reviews. I still have a few I’m waiting to see in theaters or on demand, including The Insult, Foxtrot, In the Fade, The Other Side of Hope, and Mary and the Witch’s Flower, which I’ll add to this post when I see & review them. I have seen all nine Academy Award for Best Picture nominees, all five Best Animated Feature nominees, all five Best Documentary Feature nominees, and four of the five Best Foreign Language Film nominees. All links go to my reviews on this site; there are a few animated films I never bothered to review near the bottom.

1. The Florida Project.
2. Dunkirk.
3. Loveless.
4. A Fantastic Woman.
5. The Shape of Water.
6. Columbus.
7. Phantom Thread.
8. The Big Sick.
9. Call Me By Your Name.
10. Get Out
11. Logan Lucky.
12. The Girl Without Hands.
13. Lady Bird.
14. On Body and Soul.
15. City of Ghosts.
16. The Sense of an Ending.
17. Coco.
18. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
19. In This Corner of the World.
20. A Ghost Story.
21. The Wound.
22. Icarus.
23. The Breadwinner.
24. Faces Places.
25. I, Tonya.
26. Graduation.
27. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.
28. Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
29. Dealt.
30. Marjorie Prime.
31. Ethel & Ernest.
32. Our Souls at Night.
33. Last Men in Aleppo.
34. The Square.
35. I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore.
36. The Beguiled.
37. The Lego Batman Movie.
38. The Post.
39. Loving Vincent.
40. Darkest Hour.
41. War Machine.
42. In Search of Israeli Cuisine.
43. Good Time.
44. The Lost City of Z.
45. Ferdinand.
46. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children.
47. Strong Island.
48. Baby Driver.
49. My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea.
50. Boss Baby.

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→ April 1, 2018
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The Wound.

The Oscars’ process for determining nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film is a little strange, and I don’t think it’s very widely understood – I only came across it within the last few years because I decided to see as many of the nominated films as I could. Any country can submit one film released in its market between October 1st and the following September 30th (so twelve months) in the year leading up to the awards; for the 2017 Academy Awards, a record 92 countries submitted films. The rules mean that a country with a long history of producing critically-acclaimed films, like France, or a country with a huge population and a large native film industry, like India, gets to submit the same number of films as Iceland, which was the smallest country (by population, 348,000) to submit a film this year. Last year, the South Korean film The Handmaiden, among the most critically acclaimed movies of the year, wasn’t even its own country’s nominee. This year, Loveless nearly lost out on a nomination because of political objections to its content.

The Academy changed their process about a decade ago to release a shortlist of nine films before they announce the final list of five nominees, which gives another little boost of publicity to four more films that would otherwise be shut out. This year’s shortlist included Félicité, the first-ever submission by Senegal; In the Fade, from Germany, which won the Golden Globe in the same category; Foxtrot, from Israel, which is just getting a U.S. theatrical release now; and The Wound, from South Africa, which is available now on Netflix. With dialogue primarily in the Bantu language Xhosa, with occasional Afrikaans and English, this 88-minute film feels like a thematic cousin to Moonlight, looking at a closeted gay man in South Africa as he tries to hide his identity from a traditional culture that sees homosexuals as less than men.

Based on a 2009 novel by the South African author Thando Mgqolozana, The Wound tells the story of Xolani, known to his friends as X, a quiet, lonely worker in a South African warehouse who is asked by a family friend to come serve as the ‘caregiver’ to the man’s son in the amaXhosa circumcision ritual known as ulwaluko, which marks the passage of young men, called initiates, into full manhood. The ritual takes place over several weeks on ‘the mountain,’ where X meets his old friend and secret paramour Vija, who has a wife and family at home. X’s charge, Kwanda, is seen as ‘soft’ (I think that’s code for gay) and pampered both by his father and by the other initiates, who also suspect that he’s gay, but while he’s not ‘out’ in the western sense, he’s certainly less willing to wear the mask that X does and fights back against the bullying of the other boys. Kwanda quickly grasps what X and Vija are up to, and that X is far more emotionally invested in the relationship than Vija is, eventually pushing X in a student-teaches-the-teacher twist to demand more for himself, if not with Vija then with someone else. The wound of the film’s title refers, of course, to the wounds of circumcision – treated in ghoulish fashion with traditional ‘herbs’ and techniques rather than modern medicine – and what X presumably has carried inside him his entire life as a gay amaXhosa man whose family and culture would view him as a degenerate and less than a man if they knew his orientation.

The South African film ratings board caved to public pressure and gave the film an X18 rating, akin to labeling it pornography, even though there’s nothing explicit in the film and any sex scenes are shown either in silhouette or at a distance. This only reinforces the story’s point, that the tyranny of these traditions actually serves to dehumanize men who are born gay into a world that won’t accept them. Kwanda has a dryly humorous rant towards the end of the film about how the ritual just shows how men are obsessed with their own genitalia – not long after one of the other initiates is showing off his “Mercedes-Benz” circumcision, which, fortunately, is not pictured – and serves as a sly, figurative criticism of the importance placed on a traditional ceremony focused on one physical manifestation of manhood that tells us nothing about the man within.

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→ March 31, 2018
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Loveless.

Loveless was one of the five nominees for the most recent Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the latest film from Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return, Leviathan), after it won the Jury Prize at Cannes and earned a nomination for Best Film at the European Film Awards, where it lost to The Square. It is a grim, intense, misanthropic film that expresses the director’s extreme discontent at the decline in his home country’s society under Vladimir Putin, and despite how painful the film can be to watch, it’s also one of the best films I’ve seen from 2017.

Loveless skips the prologue, so when the film opens, the couple Zhenya and Boris are already divorcing and at each others’ throats, trying to sell their condo and dispose of their unwanted 12-year-old son Alexey (also called Aloysha within the movie). An early, harrowing scene shows the two insulting each other while trying to avoid taking responsibility or custody of their son, whom Zhenya wants to just ship off to boarding school; unbeknownst to them, Alexey is hiding in the next room, caught in a silent scream as he cries and hears how neither of his parents wants anything to do with him. Both have already moved on to new relationships, Boris with an attractive and very pregnant young blonde named Marsha, Zhenya with a slightly older but very fit and successful man named Anton, and the first 40% or so of the film shows them happily adjusting to their new lives and having lots of sex.

The film’s tone turns abruptly when Zhenya calls Boris to say that Alexey’s school called and that he hasn’t been seen in school for two days. Both parents were so busy screwing their new partners that neither noticed he was missing. The remainder of the film follows the search for Alexey, from disinterested police to the volunteer crew that helps find missing people to the virulent acrimony between the two parents, neither of whom seems all that broken up over their son’s disappearance.

The story takes place against a backdrop of a literally and figuratively cold Moscow, full of abandoned and decaying buildings, denuded forests in midwinter, and people who can barely bother to care about anything but themselves. Boris’ employer is a fundamentalist Christian who requires his employees to be married with kids, and he fears losing his job if his divorce is discovered; Zhenya owns a beauty salon where her employees all seem to have similar stories of faithless ex-husbands. When the investigating police officer and then the head of the search-and-rescue force both come to talk to the parents, the two reveal that they know little about their son’s life, struggling to identify any more than one friend or to say what his interests might be. Characters often disengage with the people around them by mindlessly scrolling social media sites – none more so than Zhenya, who can’t even pay attention to Anton, the man she supposedly loves, for a full dinner.

Zvyagintsev’s disaffection at the state of his country extends beyond the mere callousness of its citizens to the manipulative autocracy established by Vladimir Putin. (There was even a political campaign against this film before the Russian board chose to submit it as the country’s nominee this year.) We hear radio and TV news broadcasts that decry fake news while also disseminating heavily one-sided reports on the country’s invasion of eastern Ukraine and the Crimea. The state is useless to its citizens; the police can barely be bothered to look into the disappearance of a 12-year-old boy, and the officer dismisses the parents’ half-hearted concerns by discussing the stats on runaways and suggesting that the kid is probably just hanging out at the mall.

The long shots of empty buildings, bare forests, and peeling trees give the movie a dystopian feel, as if we’re in the Eurasia of 1984, even though there’s nothing overtly dystopian about the plot. Zvyagintsev keeps the overt political references to a minimum until the very end of the film – which, mild spoiler, there isn’t going to be a happy ending to this story – instead depicting the individuals in the story as selfish to the point of sociopathy, including the two parents and Zhenya’s lunatic, paranoid mother, who seems to loathe her own daughter and thinks that this is all a scam to try to con her out of her house or whatever meager possessions she might still own. The question that lingers over the story, unstated but strongly implied, is what kind of state might lead its citizens to such savage ideas even when their material needs are met.

The two lead actors, Aleksey Rozin (Boris … why is it always Boris) and Maryana Spivak (Zhenya), are superb, but Matvey Novikov steals the few scenes he has as Alyosha/Aleksey, even though it’s his first credited role. Alexey Fateev also shines as Ivan, the head of the volunteer force, the only truly ‘good’ character in the film, bringing a convincing blend of command and empathy to his role, which involves leading the search and dealing with these two feckless parents who didn’t even notice their kid was missing for two days.

A Fantastic Woman won the Oscar over Loveless, and the Chilean film is a more entertaining movie with a more important message and a command performance from Daniela Vega, a trans woman playing a trans woman, to power it. That’s a movie I could recommend to just about anybody. Loveless is, in a way, like a great Russian novel of the peak period in that country’s literature: It’s brilliant, searing, overwhelming, and yet bleak and incisive enough that many viewers would likely rather turn away than fight through to the mirthless finish.

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